Jonathan Kay: Meet Mitt Romney, McPlutocrat

Meet Mitt Romney, McPlutocrat

Before I get to Mitt Romney, let me drive down memory line — which, in my case, comes with its own McDonald’s drive-thru.

At a public event about a decade ago, I was seated next to the President of McDonald’s Canada. When he gave me a business card that could be redeemed for a free Big Mac — it was even shaped like a Big Mac — I think he was shocked at how excited I became. Like tens of millions of North Americans on a limited budget, free fast food is something that I have spent a large part of my life dreaming about.

One of my earliest stints as a working stiff was in the run-up to the Canadian federal election of 1984. As 15-year-olds, my friend Josh and I worked in the basement of Saint-Léon de Westmount Church, typing up address labels for voter cards. (I got six cents for each label, and then another half a penny each for affixing them to the cards.) As a hungry teenager, I calculated my wages according to hamburgers: It took me about 45 minutes to earn enough for a Big Mac. (The church was four blocks from the Atwater Street McDonald’s, then one of the busiest locations in the world, being kitty corner from the Forum).

A year later, I got a job at that very McDonald’s location, making $3.54 an hour (which was then minimum wage for under-18 workers). One of the reasons I took the job was the free meal I got every shift — composed of one sandwich, one fries, and one drink. That fringe benefit — calculated on an hour-by-hour basis — comprised about 20% of my earnings.

A few years later, in college, I had a McDonald’s “student card” — it even had my name on it — that entitled me to a free fries with the purchase of any large sandwich (this was before the era when combo meals were the universal staple of fast food menus). I could calculate to the penny how much I would spend on my daily fix. It was a penny-pinching habit that stayed with me well into my National Post days, when I would organize my Wendy’s orders in such a way as to avoid taxes, and find creative ways to maximize food intake at a constant price (many people still don’t know that you can substitute a chili for a fries in a combo meal).

No, I’m not preening for the job of Post food critic. Rather, I recite all this to make the point that people take the economics of fast food extremely seriously. That’s why even small changes in industry pricing — say, the introduction of a 99-cent value menu, or seasonal specials — can drive massive shifts in consumer demand. For a lot of poor families in the United States, especially, fast food is the only restaurant experience they can afford.

Needless to say, the Romney clan is not one of those families. Which, in itself, is fine: There’s nothing wrong with being an insanely rich plutocrat who doesn’t need to count his pennies when he’s ordering a Baconator. What is problematic is being profoundly out of touch with those who do.

Speaking to a Chicago audience this week, Romney told a story about rifling through a drawer in his childhood home, and finding a card, belonging to his father, entitling him to free McDonald’s hamburgers — for life.

“It said [that] this entitles George W. Romney to a lifetime of a hamburger, a shake and french fries at McDonald’s,” the younger Romney said. “It was signed by the hand of [McDonald’s founder] Ray Kroc. My dad had done a little training lesson or whatever for McDonald’s when there was just a handful of restaurants, and I saw this thing, and was like, ‘This is a gold mine, dad!’ ”

In his remarks, Mitt Romney added that his father used the card often — to get a free hamburger or a filet-o-fish. That shows his dad, a former auto magnate and Michigan governor, had the common touch; and that he didn’t spend all his time eating lobster tails and steak. But the very existence of that card, and Romney’s casual discussion of it, betrays a shocking tone-deafness — not unlike his appearance at Daytona’s International Speedway in February, when he tried to present himself as an ordinary NASCAR-loving fan by remarking, “I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.”

The 15-year-old in me positively shivers at the idea of owning such a card — for a teenager, the culinary equivalent of an Aladdin’s Lamp with unlimited wishes. Tens of millions of American families, for whom fast food ranks as a major line item on their monthly budget, must see that magic card in the same light. That Romney should mention its existence as part of a casual childhood anecdote seems to capture, in a chicken-nugget-sized microcosm, the gulf that separates his economic baseline from that of ordinary Americans.

It also says something about American plutocracy itself. Republicans such as Romney dismiss as “class warfare” any suggestion that the rich and poor are governed by different rules — even as studies show that class mobility in the United States is now lower than in the “socialist” nations of Canada or Scandinavia.

Yet what better symbol is there of this two-tiered system that one in which one of the richest men in America gets his Big Macs for free.